Sunday, July 22, 2007

Peaches on the Vine

My Summer Peach Vine pullover is coming together.

I like to knit sweaters from the top down. I started with raglans, branched out into round yokes and yokes picked up from shoulder straps and eventually started knitting sweaters with set-in sleeves from the top.

For the Peach Vine, I used Garment Designer to do the initial math. The shaping instructions that it produces don't seem to harmonize with the way I knit sweaters. After it gives me the chart, I need to interpret it in knitting: simplifying certain shaping elements, changing others to short rows, and making sure that shaping elements that need to fall on a right or wrong row do so.

I haven't decided whether this is less work than doing all the math myself.

I start by knitting the first few inches of the back, doing the shoulder shaping with short rows.

Next, I pick up along the shoulders and knit the first few inches of the front. Again, the shoulder shaping is done with short rows, and the neck shaping with increases along the front edge.

When the back and fronts are long enough, I pick up along the edges for the sleeve caps.

I use size 0 circular needles to pick up the stitches along the edges.

The whole yoke is now knit in one piece.

Neck shaping (in this case, a deep scoop neck) continues. Meanwhile, the sleeves are knit in Traveling Vine. At this point, the sleeves increase steadily and the front and back are worked even.